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She was on her way to a job interview in Kansas City, but she never got past St. Louis. Anne Keefe got an early morning phone call from Robert Hyland, who convinced her it would be worth her while to put down roots here and work at KMOX.

During her stopover here, some of Keefe’s acquaintances let Hyland know of her extensive broadcast background, and he phoned her at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

“I got to the phone and he said, ‘This is Robert Hyland.’ Now I had no idea who Bob Hyland was. I’d been working in television in upstate New York for 20 years!”

He said, ‘I hear you’re a top-notch news broadcaster and I’m interested in hiring you.’ And I told him I wasn’t so sure he could afford me because radio people were paid a lot less than those of us in television. And he said, ‘I can afford anything I want.’”

Hyland had already dispatched a car to pick her up and soon Anne Keefe was sitting in the corner office at 1 Memorial Drive. After a brief conversation he asked her if she’d go on the air that night. That was in 1976. Seventeen years later Keefe retired from broadcasting, having attained renown as the woman in the KMOX lineup.

In 1976, broadcast operations were not enlightened in terms of gender equality, and Anne Keefe had just settled into a den of testosterone. Why? “Well, I was 50 years old. I was not a kid. If I’d been 25 I couldn’t have survived. The male talent were absolutely cold. Thank God for the engineers. They got me through it.”

KMOX wasn’t her first foray into radio. She’d been in that end of the broadcast business in 1946. “I got a job at WHAM while I was in college in Rochester [N.Y.]. It was a 50,000 watt station and they had ‘old time radio.’ They had copy writers, continuity writers, a full, 17-piece orchestra. Nothing was said on the air that hadn’t been written in advance. There was no ad-libbing. I learned the news business from the former newspaper guys who were working in our newsroom.

“I worked on the station’s dramas. They paid me $7.00 a show. I was a great screamer. Audiences would come to watch the production.”

In 1950, Anne Keefe moved into television, hosting “Anne’s Attic,” “Romper Room,” even a cooking show. Later, at age 50 and looking for work, Keefe didn’t immediately accept the offer to join the KMOX staff. She consulted with a friend in the St. Louis broadcast industry who warned her that Hyland was known as a man who would hire someone, but, tiring of that person quickly, would then find a reason to fire him or her.

She had two kids in college and one in high school, and as a single mother, she couldn’t afford to make such a risky move. Before saying “yes” to Robert Hyland, she was able to secure the offer of a backup job at a local tv station if things didn’t work out at KMOX, an arrangement she kept secret from Hyland. But things did work out at KMOX.

“Hyland was a star maker, and he never interfered with the content of my shows or my approach.
“When I first came here, I think I was too abrasive. The style back East was to hold people to account. That didn’t work here. It was too aggressive. My mother advised me on how to soften the approach by coming in the back door rather than using direct confrontation.”

In retrospect, the job she thought long and hard about taking turned out to be the best professional move she’d ever made. “I could call anybody in the world for my show. I could call the Soviet Union. I interviewed the greatest writers. It was an ideal job and the young people who worked with me were so wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone having a job like that today, and I got paid for it!”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/06)

A new radio broadcasting station with headquarters in the Hotel Chase took the air recently over a wave length of 239.9 meters. The station, organized under the laws of Missouri, is being operated by the Greater St. Louis Broadcasting Corporation, which has acquired the good will, assets, apparatus, call letters and wave length of station KFVE.

The new corporation is headed by Thomas P. Convey, president; David W. Hill, vice-president of the International Life Insurance Company, holds similar office in the new body, and George T. Thompson, vice-president of the Hotel Chase, is secretary.

One wing of the ninth floor has been reconstructed and converted into a transmitting studio, offices and reception room.

The station is not operated on the unit basis, Convey states, but toll rights are being allotted to individual concerns and organizations on a contract basis. Only professional talent is to be used, quality rather than quantity being the policy of the station. In order to insure good programs, all contracts provide that a stipulated budget must be set aside by the contracting companies for talent.

“In organizing this station, we proceeded on the theory that rather than ask for a new wave length and further congest the air, we would take an existing wave length and utilize it,” Convey said. “As our corporation name implies, we intend to use the station to further any plan looking to a better and greater St. Louis. In this connection we have invited the Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Publicity Bureau, Better Business Bureau, the Advertising Club, the American Retailers’ Association, Salesmanagers’ Bureau and other civic bodies to join.”

“It is our aim to give a short program each evening.”

The Chamber of Commerce has appointed a committee composed of W. Palmer Clarkson, Charles A Pearson and J. Will Finlay, to inquire into the feasibility of broadcasting programs over the new station.

Convey, who came to St. Louis in January, 1925, has been intimately identified with radio for a long time. He organized and developed the St. Louis Radio Trades Association, the Southwest National Radio Show and Station KMOX. He had a leading part in the Hoover radio conference in Washington in October, 1925, and served on a special publicity committee of three. During the latter part of last year he was identified with the Chamber of Commerce on special work.

The new station will be flexible and capable of operating on from 500 to 2,500 watts, but it is the intention to increase this by fall to 5,000 watts.

(Originally published in Greater St. Louis April, 1927).

There was a time when the radio disc jockey was a true celebrity. It was a status that was earned and deserved. One of those stars in St. Louis was Gil Newsome. But it was his work prior to becoming a DJ that made him stand out from the crowd.

As a college student vacationing in Newport News, Va., he got a radio job from a station manager impressed by Gil’s voice. He took an offer in Richmond, Va., because they offered him more money – a whopping $15 a week. He moved up to Cincinnati, then Philadelphia and then to the big time.

In the 1940s, Newsome worked as a fill-in announcer for the Glenn Miller Band on the “Chesterfield Time” radio broadcast on CBS. The gig was enough to get Newsome noticed by some of the big guys in programming, and he was hired as the first master of ceremonies for “Coca Cola’s Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands,” a national broadcasting job he held for four years.

The program traveled to military installations around the U.S. during World War II and did remote big band broadcasts in front of the troops. John Dunning, writing in his “Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio,” quotes a typical announcer’s script for the program: “As Charlie Spivak signs his musical signature in Coca-Cola’s guest register, it’s been night number 731 for the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands, and we’ve marched 896,415 Spotlight miles.”

Gil Newsome hit St. Louis in 1945, taking a DJ job at KWK, and he became one of the hardest-working personalities in the market. Stella Pollack, writing in the May 1950 issue of “Prom” magazine, noted, “His work doesn’t end when he gives that familiar sign-off at the end of a radio show; it’s just beginning!
“From the station he’s off to emcee a youth program, officially open a new teen town, appear at a high school or at a church. In the past five years Gil has made over a thousand public appearances for his favorite fans, the teenagers of this area! Get paid for it? Not exactly – Gil says it’s so much fun he’s more than well-paid.”

Gil Newsome’s first contract at KWK was for one year. He stayed at the station for 16 years. In 1946, Newsome began a Saturday morning show called the “Teen Thirty O’Clock Club.” Originating from the KWK studios at the Chase Hotel, the record show gave the teenage members of the studio audience a chance to win record albums by giving the correct answers to questions on the air.

Soon the crowds of teens exceeded the studio capacity and the show was moved to the big auditorium at St. Louis House at Jefferson and Lafayette, where over 1,000 audience members could be accommodated.

Over his years at KWK, Gil Newsome became the voice of St. Louis teenagers. He was honored by the Mound City Press Club (The area’s “Negro Press”) for furthering teenage race relations and received dozens of letters of praise from high school principals, civic leaders and parents, praising him for all his work with kids.

His programs were a regular stop for the top entertainers of the day: Bob Hope, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Kaye, Stan Kenton, Johnny Desmond, Billy Williams and Bill Haley and the Comets. Often he’d treat them to one of his wife’s home-cooked meals afterward.

Just how good was Newsome? He was ranked among the nation’s top 30 DJs for the movie “Disc Jockey,” was voted the top disc jockey in the country in “Variety” magazine, and later was written up in the book “The Deejays” by Arnold Passman. In 1951 he was paid a salary of $35,000 a year.

In 1961, Gil Newsome left KWK for an announcer’s job at KSD, making a logical musical progression to an adult audience, many of whom had grown up with him. He died of cancer in 1965 at the age of 49.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 7/2006)